Obamacare marketing push on hold

Team Obamacare is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars of essentially frozen assets — yet another consequence of the failed launch of HealthCare.gov.

There’s no point in an ad blitz directing people to sign up on a website that doesn’t work. And while advocacy groups say they had always planned to spend more money on the back end to boost enrollment in lagging states at the end of this year and early next year, they didn’t count on the opening month fizzle.

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The website bomb is more than just an inconvenience for the groups, stocked with people who have been working for years to ensure that insurance is available to all Americans. The ad effort is an integral part of the plan to sign up enough people — particularly the “young invincibles” so critical to making the law’s exchanges a success — to make the system both accessible and affordable.

“You can have the greatest PR program imaginable on all different platforms — social, media, advertising and earned media — but you have to have a product that is functioning,” said Peter Mirijanian, a Washington PR veteran.

The pro-Obamacare interest groups have been holding back, according to White House and insurance industry sources, in large part because they don’t want to direct people to a website that’s not working.

“There was definitely a pullback,” said one health insurance company executive, noting concern about “money wasted” on advertising. “Why would you spend $1 million sending people to a website that’s broken?” the executive asked.

Enroll America, which is closely tied to the administration, has always focused its effort on digital advertising and field organizing rather than broadcast television, according to Justin Nisly, a spokesman for the group. Officials there also looked at October as a month for educating consumers, so the main shift has not been in expenditures but in directing folks to get information from human beings rather than the troubled website.

Nisly said the group has spent $5 million for digital advertising from Oct. 1 through the end of the year.

”We’ve certainly emphasized the hotline and the navigators,” Nisly said. “People are frustrated with the website. They’re not ready to give up, but they’re frustrated to the point that they want to talk to someone.”

Obama-allied Organizing for America, which has also been supporting Obamacare, did not respond to a request for comment.

Health care lobbyist Licy Do Canto of the DoCanto Group said that issues around the website have “impacted decision-making” for many other outside groups trying to prop up Obamacare too.

“Just logically, no one wants to drive or increase the problem that the website is having in terms of people intake and enrolling people and make that problem worse,” Do Canto said. “Until the administration and others get a handle on it, and I think they will, understandably you don’t want to overflood the system.”

Of course, not all of their stockpile of money would have been spent in just the days following the website launch. The groups had also been planning to reserve some money so they could focus on states with lagging enrollment toward the end of this year and in the first quarter of next year. But the combination of factors means there’s still a lot of more money than expected sitting on the sidelines as the administration struggles to get the website running efficiently and calculate enrollment figures.

And while a common cause brought together liberal health reform activists and insurance companies in passing the legislation, they now have different interests. The activists want everyone to sign up; insurance companies want people to sign up for their plans in the states in which they’re offering them.

At some point, the foot-dragging could seriously damage that campaign. For now, the White House remains sanguine about the prospects for ramping up quickly once the website is fully functional.

“Having addressed that, not only will we be liberated ourselves to encourage people to enroll,” a senior White House official told POLITICO over the weekend, “so too will the supporters of this law, and that will include a significant infusion of dollars and effort from the health plans.”

Nisly said it won’t be a problem if the website is up and running, as the White House has promised, by the end of the November — about two weeks before the December 15 deadline to ensure that folks begin receiving benefits on Jan. 1.

Health and Human Services officials have also continued regular messaging outreach with outside groups, including a Tuesday session with NAACP, SEIU, Enroll America and other Latino groups. The administration has also continued to send messaging documents highlighting the number of people signing up for insurance and stressing that any delay is unacceptable in an effort to change the prevailing narrative.

The Obama administration isn’t just leaving the PR campaign to third party groups. In July, HHS inked a $33 million contract with PR giant Weber Shandwick. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid had already signed a $3 million and $8 million contracts. Porter Novelli also has a $20 million contract with the agency.

While some of the big ad campaigns have been waylaid, others like Americans United For Change are continuing their focused ground game. The group has 11 field operatives in states like Arkansas, Colorado, Florida in an effort to highlight benefits of Obamacare and also pressuring states where the governors have rejected Medicaid funding to accept it.

Americans United for Change’s Jeremy Funk said that as a “rapid response” outfit, they will respond and run ads or create videos as needed. Most recently the group created a web video calling out House Republicans on the Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means committees for holding “phony” hearings on Obamacare’s failed rollout.

The California Endowment is also going full speed ahead. The group, which committed $225 million earlier this year in a four-year effort to support ACA is among the largest investors in pro-Obamacare efforts besides the federal government itself.

The Endowment’s Daniel Zingale said the federal websites problems hasn’t slowed it down because its focused on the California exchange.

“Our point of entry is through our exchange and we haven’t had nearly the problems of the feds,” Zingale said. “We know we’re in it for the long haul… This is a once-in-a-century opportunity. We won’t walk away from it under any circumstances.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story used an incorrect first name for Daniel Zingale.